Beer has been made for many years by various well known techniques and by using various apparatuses for many years, as is well known. In general, these techniques can be divided into commercial and homemaking methods. Commercial techniques produce consistent quality effervescent beer of various types but the price of such effervescent beer is high due to taxes and the like which are placed on the beer.
Homemaking beer is far less expensive than buying commercially available beer and has become increasingly popular as the price of commercially available beer continues to rise. Various techniques have been used to produce homemade beer but there are disadvantages with many.
In general, homemade beer is made in an "open" system. That is, homemade beer is generally made under ambient or atmospheric conditions where the beer is exposed to the atmosphere. Making beer under these conditions allows oxygen to be absorbed into the beer. This can adversely affect shelf-life expectancy and flavor degradation. In addition, cleanliness is very important in making homemade beer and with the variety of containers, hoses and the like which inherently must be used in the process, the cleanliness requirement is troublesome. Yet a further disadvantage is that beer produced by homemade techniques is inconsistent in quality between batches. Because of these disadvantages, the homemade beer industry is not growing as robustly as might otherwise be the case.